As the husband of a Japanese immigrant who is a proud supporter of the Japanese American National Museum, let's call them what JANM does: concentration camps. Don't accept and don't dignify whatever euphemism the fascist regime decides upon.
I don't want to minimize the horror of what Japanese Americans experienced in US camps -- but neither do I want to minimize the extreme horror of the concentration camps in which Nazis pretty much tortured all Jews (insufficient food, heat, and living space for everyone, in addition to forced labor, beatings, medical experiments for some, etc.). That didn't happen to Japanese Americans, nor has it happened to the immigrants who have been rounded up in the past 10+ years.
So please *don't* use the term "concentration camps" for anything other than the Nazi torture-and-death camps. "Internment camps" or "immigrant-detention centers" are accurate and not euphemistic.
Take that that up with the Japanese Americans, like George Takei, who were there. You ARE, in fact, minimizing what happened to them when you use the same term employed by the American government that imprisoned them. . The survivors of the Nazi death camps don't own the term.
Calling deportation "concentration camps", trying to equate policy to genocide, is a Krugman euphemism, trying to generate emotional reaction, namely fear. He's setting the stage of fear, by pointing to the human emotional effects, to set the stage for part 2 of his "thesis", that deportation will be an economic disaster for USA, when even his own data points to a minor 5% effect, and even acknowledges that "legal" workers in USA are slowly being squeezed out of the labor market. Mind you these will be the "marginal" workers, like teens, those with disabilities, those with less education, those with less training, those with less skills; Any wonder why so many in America are starting to wake up to those facts, and some politicians are addressing them.
"a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or minority ethnic groups, on the grounds of state security, or for exploitation or punishment.[1] Prominent examples of historic concentration camps include the British confinement of non-combatants during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans by the US during the Second World War, the Nazi concentration camps (which later morphed into extermination camps), and the Soviet labour camps or gulag."
They lost their freedom and, very often, their homes and most of their personal property FOR NO GOOD REASON. You're splitting hairs to make yourself feel better. Now let's hear your justification for Jim Crow.
When it comes to defining concentration camps, I'm going to rely on experts rather than random people on Substack. In this case, the expert is a published author and scholar named Andrea Pitzer, whose 2017 book "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps" includes the following:
"Political philosopher Hannah Arendt described concetration camps as divided into Purgatory, Hades, and Hell, moving from the netherland of internment to labor camps of the Gulag and Nazi death factories. But nearly all concentration camps share one feature: they extract people from one area to house them somewhere else. It sounds like a simple concept, but both elements are distinct and important. Camps require the removal of a population from a society with all its accompanying rights, relationships, and connections to humanity. This exclusion is followed by an involuntary assignment to some lesser condition or place, generally detention with other undesirables under armed guard."
Pitzer concludes her discussion of the defining characteristics of a concentration camp with another quote from Hannah Arendt:
"All three types [of camps] have one thing in common: the human masses sealed in them are treated as if they no longer matter, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death."
I'm not terribly interested in debating whether something was or wasn't a concentration camp at this stage, because to do so is a distraction. Trump's army of online ventriloquist dummies wasted countless hours of our time four years ago pretending that terminology was the issue, as if what you called something made it any less inhumane.
It is highly likely, in my view, that those who end up in Trump's camps will be sent to farms as forced labor as the workforce dries up - don't you think?
They were put in concentration camps, but not death camps. Although there were many preventable deaths in the camps that would not have occurred had the people not been moved there forcibly.
Oh, and by the way, do you know where Japanese were not interned? In Hawaii, the only part of the US actually attacked by the Empire of Japan.
Some Japanese people were indeed used to perform slave labour.
"Shortly after the arrival of the first internee groups in June, Lundy ordered them to perform punishing manual labor in midday heat" (Lordsburg Internment Camp).
Retroactively reserving the name "concentration camp" for Nazi Germany would just miss the point IMO. We're a long way from extermination camps, and that makes it more important to see individual steps.
Having named the tactic of rounding up civilians and putting them into camps, often during war? I'm inclined to think blanket rejection is just euphemism :-).
I can imagine there are arguments about appropriate ways to communicate this history. Perhaps you could provide one more interesting than ~"no, actually they weren't". Do you wish to take the position that only one concentration camp met your preferred criteria, and only for a few months during which they also shot dead two elderly men claimed to be trying to escape?
Another comment troll folks. If they don’t add to the discourse meaningfully, please don’t engage. A question like that is only meant to distract/deflect/whatever ⬆️ is. Also you can mute/block by clicking on their name to get to their profile, then choosing mute/block from (…) menu on their profile page.
RRL: take off your rose colored glasses- this is our history. We did it first to American Indians, next to Black Americans and again to the Japanese. We are guilty as sin if we deny these truths.
The camps were not horrific like those in Germany but they were concentration camps by definition. My dad used to try to justify it by saying, "We were in a fucking war!" True, but we were also at war with Germany, but he didn't order the rounding up of (white) German citizens and start putting them in camps, only Japanese.
The page you link to makes it very clear that the experiences of Japanese Americans we placed in those camps were qualitatively different from those of Germans and Italians:
"While civilians of Japanese ancestry were subject to a three-tiered process of exclusion, removal, and internment, most of America's ethnic Germans and Italians were spared from one substantial component: they were not forced to endure a comprehensive program of removal followed by incarceration in WRA camps...Anti-Asian prejudice coupled with the fact that German and Italian immigrants—unlike Japanese Issei —were eligible for U.S. citizenship enabled members of these ethnic communities to become more closely enmeshed within the American social fabric than their Japanese counterparts. The majority of German and Italian-born civilians living in the United States in 1941 had already received American citizenship. In fact, President Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry J. Stimson quickly dismissed the notion that Italian Americans posed any danger to the American war effort. Given these factors, although General John L. DeWitt initially recommended the mass removal of ethnic Germans and Italians residing in coastal areas, it is not surprising that a congressional committee led by California Representative John H. Tolan rejected his proposal. (See Tolan Committee.) People of Italian ancestry received an additional boost on Columbus Day 1942, when Attorney General Francis Biddle officially deleted Italians from the ranks of enemy aliens."
Yes. They were the definition of concentration camp. I think you are deeply misinformed. There were concentration camps well before the Nazis used them. In South Africa during the Boer War, for example.
If the US survives this, and it almost certainly will not, not to mention the international system that has been in place for 80 years, it's reputation will not survive. It is a failed state; corrupt to the very core - even the Supreme Court, the media, and its once venerable institutions; and by the time Trump and his oligarchs have dismantled the safeguards and ransacked the treasuries, there'd be nothing left. No international alliances, its currency system trashed. And all accomplished because the American citizenry is complacent and self-satisfied. I'm afraid substacks aren't going to save you, or us.
I saw a YouTube video this morning asking people if a) they want change, and b) they want TO change; stating that "a" wasn't possible without "b". "A" got a much bigger response than "b" as you can imagine. In this case, people reacted to surface events (high prices, a "flood" of immigrants) without bothering to question how those events came about. So yes, self-satisfaction and complacency is part of the problem, only part of it. Lack of education and lack of self-awareness or critical thinking is another. A lot of people are no longer given the intellectual tools with which to look beneath the surface of an issue. So when Daddy Donny says, "I'll get rid of those immigrant 'invaders' and make eggs cheaper as well!" they accept it at face value and move on, not worrying too much about possible repercussions.
And let’s not forget that many ARE paying attention to news - not knowing that their news is propaganda. The scale and scope of media propaganda is a new thing. So is the fear-mongering and hate-mongering that is flooding their airways, their Wi-Fi, their radio stations, billboards, church pulpits, etc. When institutions they have trusted have also brainwashed them? This is powerful stuff and I don’t think we should reflexively demonize people for not being able to understand and resist.
I see what you’re saying, but again, that comes in large part from not being able to think critically. And this was largely by design. One of the biggest offenders was Roger Ailes of Fox News, who set off to create an alternative reality (and who also first had the idea to have Tr*mp run in 2016.) And often when people get weaned off of that stuff, their capacity for reason increases dramatically. The 2015 documentary “The Brainwashing of My Dad” is a good example. (BTW, I re-read the last sentence of my previous comment and thought it sounded a bit condescending so I modified it slightly.)
I read you, and agree but for the last sentence. Maybe this substack stops with you, but it doesn't with me. I am going to use it in my conversations. Especially with those who I know are duped by this Project. Not to gloat, but to silently urge them to choose otherwise.
Exactly this: I've been sharing these posts with friends and family, and referencing them in conversations. If even a few of my immediate sphere of influence utilize this information, I can raise awareness and action against an administration that depends most of all that we remain demoralized and disorganized.
In my opinion you are being way over the top to make your point..stick with facts and call your representatives. The majority of Americans don’t want what administration wants to put push. You undermine facts like the extreme right. There are plenty of things that concern everyone. Please drilled down on these in letters to the editor and to your representatives. Engage with local issues where you can actually have an impact. Power is not consolidated. It is still fluid and we need to put pressure on representative.
Don't know where I didn't stick with facts. And I don't see where calling your representative will change the direction of the administration, or the court, or the media. But I am Canadian, and see this from a different perspective, international not domestic.
Thank you. Much of the "failed state" hyperbole is coming from white people who didn't realize U.S. "democracy" was in trouble till Trump was elected the first time. The Reagan administration was in large part a reaction against all the attempts of previous decades to make democracy work for people of color and women of all colors. We've been on this trajectory for a long time and now we've hit bottom. Can we pull out of it? That remains to be seen.
Agreed. This started in 1981 when Reagan took over. The issue is the Dems have simply become a part of this trickle down bullshit theory. Tax the living fuck out of Elon etc. and do it now. 90% of their wealth needs to be taxed.
Yep. I'd like to see full financial reports on the upper-level elected Dems, how they've benefited personally from trickle-down and Reagan and post-Reagan tax policy, and also from their various book, media, and lecture deals.
I also think people bemoaning how we’re a failed state and it’s all over have also checked out like the people they complain about. We only fall over if we give up. We only give up our dignity if we give up before it’s over, and really, it’s never “over” , no matter how far this goes.
No? What does it look like? Power and money concentrated in a few hands? No health care? No equal treatment in courts? No unbiased media? No watchdogs on institutions? No constraints? Cronies at the head of once-venerable institutions? No intellectual life? RIse and rise of religious right? No constraint on industry? Pay to play?
I think we've fallen down, but I still believe we can get back up again. Media is changing as people move away from MSM and social media sites. Some courts have problems, others don't. Huge push back on Christian Nationalism. drumpf won by 1.5% of the vote, and more people didn't vote than voted for him or Harris. A host of problems that are actively being worked on by thousands of people, Hope, we need it.
I disagree. The US will survive this because normal people will endure and live on. Remember the Cultural Revolution in China was in the late 60s - 70s and despite 10 years of violent repression, famine, natural disaster, destruction of cultural heritage and lynching of scientists and intellectuals by the 90’s seemed to be doing very well. People have objected to my theory saying well that’s because China has millennia of history and cultural identity behind it, but don’t forget America is a nation of immigrants and immigrants are scrappy.
This is supposed to be cheering? China was, and is, a dictatorship. You'd be okay with that happening to the US? But my concern isn't domestic; it's your international policies that are so concerning to those outside the US, and your interference in the issues of sovereign states. But you carry on being Pollyanna.
Sorry for your distress. Maybe try being a Canadian or a Dane or a Panamanian or a Palestinian or Ukrainian to realize what weariness and fear might be like. Or are we just being Confederates?
I disagree that Trump is surrounding himself with sycophants. I think the Project 2025 agenda has been written and Trump has been recruited as the cipher to carry it out. He has little to no understanding of what he is selling to the US public. He doesn't have to. The likes of Stephen Miller are the architects and executors of Trump’s policies. Trump is merely the front man - the salesman. Those sycophants are the ones pulling the strings of government. Trump will be kept happy signing executive orders for the cameras, meeting dignitaries, getting daily headline coverage, making money out of the Presidency despite the emoluments clause, staying out of prison and SLAPP suiting anyone and everyone. Likewise, Trump weirdo appointees like Hegseth will be mere front men and women, political camouflage, for the real puppetmasters.
He does not care what he is selling to the public, in my view.
The project 2025 types and Christian Nationalists and various conspiracy fringes and
"owning the lib types" helped him get back to power when all voting together, and that is what it is about.
He will enrich himself and wants to be an authoritarian and in the process he will let them all have at our destruction if he thinks he can benefit as a result.
He cobbled together just enough fringe groups to win an election. This is why he brought people like RFK, Jr and Gabbard on board. It was all a numbers game.
However, I do think the racism is genuine on Trump's part. He seems to see rich whites, like himself, as having more value than others. Just look at the way he visited the Palisades and not Altadena after the fires and the types of language he uses for immigrants of color, dehumanizing them.
A few people have said that. I agree. Project 2025 needed someone like Trump and Trump needed something like Project 2025...it's a symbiotic relationship. I have read or seen analysis that what the US is experiencing in Trump and Project 2025 is the inevitable result of Reaganism. Trump is a very one dimensional villian. He is racist but has no capacity to understand the economic (or any other) implications of his personal philosophy (if you can even call it that), other than whether it brings him immediate validation, attention, power and wealth. He's a narcissist but a very stupid one. However, I am not convinced the authors of Project 2025 are so stupid. I think they may understand that they are taking a wrecking ball to the US economy but they are doing it for a higher cause in their mind which can be largely summarised as neo-Nazism and a new US hegemony. Trump and his bunch of weirdos are the acceptable face of that. I cannot imagine Stephen Miller, Russ Vought or Tom Homan being capable of the same job.
And don't forget a compliant - sometimes enthusiastically so - Senate and House. They're the pipeline to making this all more than mere ephemeral executive orders.
You're right that a Cheeto is a tool for the Project 2025 folks - but it's also correct that the sycophants around him will not stop his worst instincts, e.g. getting revenge on people by politicizing the DOJ, withholding FEMA aid from states that he doesn't like, imposing tariffs that have the potential to upend our economy, etc.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
It's astounding. To this day Republicans are still trying to avenge Nixon. Even those who weren't even born yet.. Assuming for a moment that humanity survives long enough, future historians a century or two from now will be looking at the criminality of the Reagan administration, Bush I, Bush II, and now Trump, and marvel at how gullible the voting public was.
People who voted for felon47 are not stupid. They knew what they were voting for, and they like what they got. They are, however, willfully ignorant and able to inaccurately blame Democrats for anything they don’t like.
They will happily crash the entire countries economy just to make the brown folks feel afraid and suffer. Shame they don't realize their hatred is burning the house down with all of us still trapped inside it.
I have seen people say the Trumpists will come around once they see the damage to the economy, but based on what I know about history they will probably not. Musk is certainly not intelligent enough to be Trump's Hjalmar Schacht, the gifted if evil finance minister of the early Third Reich. But he might prove to be a passable Fritz Sauckel. Sauckel was the man who organized the "Reichsarbeitsdienst", the compulsory service that pressed jobless Germans into forced labor at essentially an apprentice's wage, half of which was withheld for food and barrack housing. It is hard to image than the new administration will let an opportunity pass to make the poor work for the rich and harvest those fields. And it did not reduce support for the Nazi regime back then. On the contrary, support for Hitler grew stronger. Historian Götz Aly proposed a theory (that did not make it into academic mainstream AFAIK) that Germans felt they were so much in on the crime by being complicit for too long, that they saw their only chance of not being judged or punished in doubling down and physically destroy all that might condemn them, and based on the responses to the last week, this might be very well what will happen in response to Trumpism (and not just in the US; European business "leaders" (no accident this translates to "Führer") essentially propose that Europe should give in and bow essentially to Trump rule. Don't be hopeless, but don't put your hope into the ones who created this mess.
Consider: states are beginning to experiment with child labor. Do we think rich kids will be working in the slaughterhouses?
Congress is once again trying to require recipients of federal assistance to work, including people who receive Medicaid. Do we think rich people are receiving Medicaid? And the continuing efforts to get rid of Obamacare? If people must rely on employment to receive healthcare, they will put up with many exploitive labor practices. Again, do we think rich people will be harmed by this? Eike, I agree with you: the oligarchs will make sure every poor person is forced into serfdom.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the people who complained that national interest was undermined by international financial elites are undermining national interest with support from international financial elites; the Nazis are the people the Nazis warned us against.
The specter of vigilantism is terrifying—and we know how the current administration deals with vigilantes—they pardon them and elevate them. I appreciate the charts, to see how bad this will be for so many industries, especially home building and construction.
It is all horrifying, with echoes both of the Nazi regime and apartheid South Africa. I grew up under an authoritarian regime, and these are all signs of one. Appalling. Thank you for your excellent coverage.
Prof. Krugman -- Jonathan V. Last has suggested that Trump's deportation raids and other economic actions will try to hurt blue states and spare red states: https://substack.com/home/post/p-155332951 . What are your thoughts about this?
Yep. Now that we're not going to enforce the Civil Rights Act, I'm waiting to see conservative women told they don't get the job, despite being qualified, "because that would be taking the job away from a man who needs to support his family."
That’s one of the flaws in the fascist ointment. By dominating women, denying them birth control and abortion, their “barefoot and pregnant” stay-at-home handmaids will make the labor shortages worse. Guess they will need more child labor. And maybe we seniors will have to work for our Medicare? At least those of us who aren’t fulfilling our destiny providing grandchild-care…
One reason for allied victory in ww2 was Britain and the US mobilised it's women to work in the factories whilst the men were fighting. This was anathema to Nazi ideology, who used unreliable and unmotivated slave labour.
Hegseth is going to weaken our military dramatically both by driving out women, minorities, and left-leaning men, but also by wrecking recruitment of the same people. This is not in any way a good thing for our national security.
Adam Tooze disagreed with that in "Wages of Destruction": his view is that a key Nazi economic weakness was a backward and highly labor-intensive agricultural sector, which absorbed most of the female labor that the Allies would have employed in factories.
Sometimes I feel like MAGA and the TechBros would like to adopt that Nazi program. If not for all the job vacancies, we’d be relegated to Kinder, Küche, Kirche.
First it will be Biden and the Democrat's fault. They stood in the way of the Republican's agenda. If things really start to go south, I think they'll start putting out false data.
That is exactly what he did. They didn't have gas ovens but that's exactly what they were. When you lock people up en masse because their ethnicity you are creating concentration camps. The British coined the term when they did the same with white South African farmers during the Boer War.
If we consider those in the construction trades who are voting citizens, my sense is that they are mostly Trump voters, so this talk of suspending outlays for infrastructure projects would be another case of Trump/Republican policies hurting their own base. Just what the fate of the massive Biden infrastructure projects is going to be is a key question.
The Trump voters think they voted for lower inflation, kicking out illegal criminal gangs who are taking over our cities doing bad stuff, cutting regulations that stymie business and waste money, cutting taxes by getting other countries to pay, increasing the role of Christianity and sticking it to the arrogant liberals.
MAGA has much better sales force. They lie, but that doesn't matter right now.
The MAGA base is voting against their own interests, but this isn't anything new.
I was overseas just after the inauguration and my wife, an immigrant, already was worried about forgetting her driver’s license. Neighbors are scared. I had to ask our school district about their policy regarding cooperation with law enforcement. The psychological effects are already devastating. It’s racially divided too, as my white neighbors aren’t even paying attention and are happily living their lives as if everything is normal. It’s insidious.
Brazilians were transported in a military airplane, with hands and feet in chains. They were kept like that for about 50 hours due to mechanical problems; there were children and women. Men were brutalized; the plane had to stop on Manaus, Brazilian law was ignored, people kept inside. Federal Police had to force them to open it and let the people leave. An Air Force was sent by President Lula to bring the citizens to their destination. The country (except Bolsonaro and his gang) is chocked, appalled. The USA is throwing LA countries into China arms. The Chinese are certainly enjoying the show.
As the husband of a Japanese immigrant who is a proud supporter of the Japanese American National Museum, let's call them what JANM does: concentration camps. Don't accept and don't dignify whatever euphemism the fascist regime decides upon.
I don't want to minimize the horror of what Japanese Americans experienced in US camps -- but neither do I want to minimize the extreme horror of the concentration camps in which Nazis pretty much tortured all Jews (insufficient food, heat, and living space for everyone, in addition to forced labor, beatings, medical experiments for some, etc.). That didn't happen to Japanese Americans, nor has it happened to the immigrants who have been rounded up in the past 10+ years.
So please *don't* use the term "concentration camps" for anything other than the Nazi torture-and-death camps. "Internment camps" or "immigrant-detention centers" are accurate and not euphemistic.
Take that that up with the Japanese Americans, like George Takei, who were there. You ARE, in fact, minimizing what happened to them when you use the same term employed by the American government that imprisoned them. . The survivors of the Nazi death camps don't own the term.
Calling deportation "concentration camps", trying to equate policy to genocide, is a Krugman euphemism, trying to generate emotional reaction, namely fear. He's setting the stage of fear, by pointing to the human emotional effects, to set the stage for part 2 of his "thesis", that deportation will be an economic disaster for USA, when even his own data points to a minor 5% effect, and even acknowledges that "legal" workers in USA are slowly being squeezed out of the labor market. Mind you these will be the "marginal" workers, like teens, those with disabilities, those with less education, those with less training, those with less skills; Any wonder why so many in America are starting to wake up to those facts, and some politicians are addressing them.
"a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or minority ethnic groups, on the grounds of state security, or for exploitation or punishment.[1] Prominent examples of historic concentration camps include the British confinement of non-combatants during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans by the US during the Second World War, the Nazi concentration camps (which later morphed into extermination camps), and the Soviet labour camps or gulag."
They lost their freedom and, very often, their homes and most of their personal property FOR NO GOOD REASON. You're splitting hairs to make yourself feel better. Now let's hear your justification for Jim Crow.
When it comes to defining concentration camps, I'm going to rely on experts rather than random people on Substack. In this case, the expert is a published author and scholar named Andrea Pitzer, whose 2017 book "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps" includes the following:
"Political philosopher Hannah Arendt described concetration camps as divided into Purgatory, Hades, and Hell, moving from the netherland of internment to labor camps of the Gulag and Nazi death factories. But nearly all concentration camps share one feature: they extract people from one area to house them somewhere else. It sounds like a simple concept, but both elements are distinct and important. Camps require the removal of a population from a society with all its accompanying rights, relationships, and connections to humanity. This exclusion is followed by an involuntary assignment to some lesser condition or place, generally detention with other undesirables under armed guard."
Pitzer concludes her discussion of the defining characteristics of a concentration camp with another quote from Hannah Arendt:
"All three types [of camps] have one thing in common: the human masses sealed in them are treated as if they no longer matter, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death."
I'm not terribly interested in debating whether something was or wasn't a concentration camp at this stage, because to do so is a distraction. Trump's army of online ventriloquist dummies wasted countless hours of our time four years ago pretending that terminology was the issue, as if what you called something made it any less inhumane.
“First they came for the trade unionists but because I was not a trade unionist,…”
You are playing word games. "But nearly all concentration camps share one feature: they extract people from one area to house them somewhere else."
It may be the one thing they do share, but WHY it is done and what happens
after it's done is much more important, and DEFINING.
YAWN. You bore me.
You have a narrower definition of concentration camp than the above citation. No one is claiming that exterminations camps will be developed.
Don’t put it past Stephen Miller.
Right? I wouldn't put anything past Stephen Miller.
GAZA...
It is highly likely, in my view, that those who end up in Trump's camps will be sent to farms as forced labor as the workforce dries up - don't you think?
It's certainly what happened in the Japanese-American camps during WW2.
this is a lie.
gibberish
They were put in concentration camps, but not death camps. Although there were many preventable deaths in the camps that would not have occurred had the people not been moved there forcibly.
Oh, and by the way, do you know where Japanese were not interned? In Hawaii, the only part of the US actually attacked by the Empire of Japan.
" Although there were many preventable deaths in the camps that would not have occurred had the people not been moved there forcibly."
Are you trying to make it sound that this was intentional? Like Hitler?
That's not what I said. Take off the blinders and read it again.
Some Japanese people were indeed used to perform slave labour.
"Shortly after the arrival of the first internee groups in June, Lundy ordered them to perform punishing manual labor in midday heat" (Lordsburg Internment Camp).
Retroactively reserving the name "concentration camp" for Nazi Germany would just miss the point IMO. We're a long way from extermination camps, and that makes it more important to see individual steps.
Having named the tactic of rounding up civilians and putting them into camps, often during war? I'm inclined to think blanket rejection is just euphemism :-).
I can imagine there are arguments about appropriate ways to communicate this history. Perhaps you could provide one more interesting than ~"no, actually they weren't". Do you wish to take the position that only one concentration camp met your preferred criteria, and only for a few months during which they also shot dead two elderly men claimed to be trying to escape?
"preferred criteria"
History isn't preferred. If you are equating Nazi treatment of perceived "enemies" with the WW2 Japanese in America, then you're too far gone.
Maybe you just hate FDR?
Sounds like you didn't enjoy learning today! Oh well. It was interesting to me.
Another comment troll folks. If they don’t add to the discourse meaningfully, please don’t engage. A question like that is only meant to distract/deflect/whatever ⬆️ is. Also you can mute/block by clicking on their name to get to their profile, then choosing mute/block from (…) menu on their profile page.
Thank you for this comment. I was hoping for intelligent, respectful comments and very discouraged to find mindless name calling.
A bit cumbersome, however. A one click ignore, like The FT has, would be good. Better still would be subscriber only comments.
I enjoy being able to comment, but I cannot afford to pay for it. I hope Paul keep it open to all of us. Block the rude and/or ignorant people.
Yes. He did
RRL: take off your rose colored glasses- this is our history. We did it first to American Indians, next to Black Americans and again to the Japanese. We are guilty as sin if we deny these truths.
our genoside of the Natives of America, north and south, exceeds
any other such event...
Both fruit
The camps were not horrific like those in Germany but they were concentration camps by definition. My dad used to try to justify it by saying, "We were in a fucking war!" True, but we were also at war with Germany, but he didn't order the rounding up of (white) German citizens and start putting them in camps, only Japanese.
our genoside of the Natives of America, north and south, exceeds
any other such event...
Yes
Actually, German and Italians were rounded up during WW2...
https://encyclopedia.densho.org/German_and_Italian_detainees/#:~:text=In%20addition%20to%20the%20forced,of%20ethnic%20Germans%20and%20Italians.
The page you link to makes it very clear that the experiences of Japanese Americans we placed in those camps were qualitatively different from those of Germans and Italians:
"While civilians of Japanese ancestry were subject to a three-tiered process of exclusion, removal, and internment, most of America's ethnic Germans and Italians were spared from one substantial component: they were not forced to endure a comprehensive program of removal followed by incarceration in WRA camps...Anti-Asian prejudice coupled with the fact that German and Italian immigrants—unlike Japanese Issei —were eligible for U.S. citizenship enabled members of these ethnic communities to become more closely enmeshed within the American social fabric than their Japanese counterparts. The majority of German and Italian-born civilians living in the United States in 1941 had already received American citizenship. In fact, President Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry J. Stimson quickly dismissed the notion that Italian Americans posed any danger to the American war effort. Given these factors, although General John L. DeWitt initially recommended the mass removal of ethnic Germans and Italians residing in coastal areas, it is not surprising that a congressional committee led by California Representative John H. Tolan rejected his proposal. (See Tolan Committee.) People of Italian ancestry received an additional boost on Columbus Day 1942, when Attorney General Francis Biddle officially deleted Italians from the ranks of enemy aliens."
Ask George Takei what they were.
Good heavens, is that a secret?
Yes. They were the definition of concentration camp. I think you are deeply misinformed. There were concentration camps well before the Nazis used them. In South Africa during the Boer War, for example.
So they’re only concentration camps if they exterminate people…..alrighty then.
Intent matters.
Yes. He did. Don’t kid yourself. We imprisoned Japanese during ww2
RRL: yes
Thanks for sharing your true colors. Apologists for racism always do.
If he isn't, I am.
Yes. It was wrong of course but there was the excuse of a war.
If the US survives this, and it almost certainly will not, not to mention the international system that has been in place for 80 years, it's reputation will not survive. It is a failed state; corrupt to the very core - even the Supreme Court, the media, and its once venerable institutions; and by the time Trump and his oligarchs have dismantled the safeguards and ransacked the treasuries, there'd be nothing left. No international alliances, its currency system trashed. And all accomplished because the American citizenry is complacent and self-satisfied. I'm afraid substacks aren't going to save you, or us.
I saw a YouTube video this morning asking people if a) they want change, and b) they want TO change; stating that "a" wasn't possible without "b". "A" got a much bigger response than "b" as you can imagine. In this case, people reacted to surface events (high prices, a "flood" of immigrants) without bothering to question how those events came about. So yes, self-satisfaction and complacency is part of the problem, only part of it. Lack of education and lack of self-awareness or critical thinking is another. A lot of people are no longer given the intellectual tools with which to look beneath the surface of an issue. So when Daddy Donny says, "I'll get rid of those immigrant 'invaders' and make eggs cheaper as well!" they accept it at face value and move on, not worrying too much about possible repercussions.
And let’s not forget that many ARE paying attention to news - not knowing that their news is propaganda. The scale and scope of media propaganda is a new thing. So is the fear-mongering and hate-mongering that is flooding their airways, their Wi-Fi, their radio stations, billboards, church pulpits, etc. When institutions they have trusted have also brainwashed them? This is powerful stuff and I don’t think we should reflexively demonize people for not being able to understand and resist.
I see what you’re saying, but again, that comes in large part from not being able to think critically. And this was largely by design. One of the biggest offenders was Roger Ailes of Fox News, who set off to create an alternative reality (and who also first had the idea to have Tr*mp run in 2016.) And often when people get weaned off of that stuff, their capacity for reason increases dramatically. The 2015 documentary “The Brainwashing of My Dad” is a good example. (BTW, I re-read the last sentence of my previous comment and thought it sounded a bit condescending so I modified it slightly.)
I read you, and agree but for the last sentence. Maybe this substack stops with you, but it doesn't with me. I am going to use it in my conversations. Especially with those who I know are duped by this Project. Not to gloat, but to silently urge them to choose otherwise.
Exactly this: I've been sharing these posts with friends and family, and referencing them in conversations. If even a few of my immediate sphere of influence utilize this information, I can raise awareness and action against an administration that depends most of all that we remain demoralized and disorganized.
And I'm afraid I agree. Read Paul Krugmans articles and he nails it daily.
In my opinion you are being way over the top to make your point..stick with facts and call your representatives. The majority of Americans don’t want what administration wants to put push. You undermine facts like the extreme right. There are plenty of things that concern everyone. Please drilled down on these in letters to the editor and to your representatives. Engage with local issues where you can actually have an impact. Power is not consolidated. It is still fluid and we need to put pressure on representative.
Don't know where I didn't stick with facts. And I don't see where calling your representative will change the direction of the administration, or the court, or the media. But I am Canadian, and see this from a different perspective, international not domestic.
A failed State does not look like where we are right now in the US.
Thank you. Much of the "failed state" hyperbole is coming from white people who didn't realize U.S. "democracy" was in trouble till Trump was elected the first time. The Reagan administration was in large part a reaction against all the attempts of previous decades to make democracy work for people of color and women of all colors. We've been on this trajectory for a long time and now we've hit bottom. Can we pull out of it? That remains to be seen.
Agreed. This started in 1981 when Reagan took over. The issue is the Dems have simply become a part of this trickle down bullshit theory. Tax the living fuck out of Elon etc. and do it now. 90% of their wealth needs to be taxed.
Yep. I'd like to see full financial reports on the upper-level elected Dems, how they've benefited personally from trickle-down and Reagan and post-Reagan tax policy, and also from their various book, media, and lecture deals.
I also think people bemoaning how we’re a failed state and it’s all over have also checked out like the people they complain about. We only fall over if we give up. We only give up our dignity if we give up before it’s over, and really, it’s never “over” , no matter how far this goes.
No? What does it look like? Power and money concentrated in a few hands? No health care? No equal treatment in courts? No unbiased media? No watchdogs on institutions? No constraints? Cronies at the head of once-venerable institutions? No intellectual life? RIse and rise of religious right? No constraint on industry? Pay to play?
I think we've fallen down, but I still believe we can get back up again. Media is changing as people move away from MSM and social media sites. Some courts have problems, others don't. Huge push back on Christian Nationalism. drumpf won by 1.5% of the vote, and more people didn't vote than voted for him or Harris. A host of problems that are actively being worked on by thousands of people, Hope, we need it.
A failed state vs. a failing state is a distinction without a difference. At least this early in the days of the new administration.
I disagree. The US will survive this because normal people will endure and live on. Remember the Cultural Revolution in China was in the late 60s - 70s and despite 10 years of violent repression, famine, natural disaster, destruction of cultural heritage and lynching of scientists and intellectuals by the 90’s seemed to be doing very well. People have objected to my theory saying well that’s because China has millennia of history and cultural identity behind it, but don’t forget America is a nation of immigrants and immigrants are scrappy.
This is supposed to be cheering? China was, and is, a dictatorship. You'd be okay with that happening to the US? But my concern isn't domestic; it's your international policies that are so concerning to those outside the US, and your interference in the issues of sovereign states. But you carry on being Pollyanna.
This really sounds a lot like what the Confederates were saying when their slaves were taken away.
Because SO MUCH of the citizenry. I'm already quite weary of being tarred with the same brush.
Sorry for your distress. Maybe try being a Canadian or a Dane or a Panamanian or a Palestinian or Ukrainian to realize what weariness and fear might be like. Or are we just being Confederates?
that is not helpful.
I disagree that Trump is surrounding himself with sycophants. I think the Project 2025 agenda has been written and Trump has been recruited as the cipher to carry it out. He has little to no understanding of what he is selling to the US public. He doesn't have to. The likes of Stephen Miller are the architects and executors of Trump’s policies. Trump is merely the front man - the salesman. Those sycophants are the ones pulling the strings of government. Trump will be kept happy signing executive orders for the cameras, meeting dignitaries, getting daily headline coverage, making money out of the Presidency despite the emoluments clause, staying out of prison and SLAPP suiting anyone and everyone. Likewise, Trump weirdo appointees like Hegseth will be mere front men and women, political camouflage, for the real puppetmasters.
He does not care what he is selling to the public, in my view.
The project 2025 types and Christian Nationalists and various conspiracy fringes and
"owning the lib types" helped him get back to power when all voting together, and that is what it is about.
He will enrich himself and wants to be an authoritarian and in the process he will let them all have at our destruction if he thinks he can benefit as a result.
He cobbled together just enough fringe groups to win an election. This is why he brought people like RFK, Jr and Gabbard on board. It was all a numbers game.
However, I do think the racism is genuine on Trump's part. He seems to see rich whites, like himself, as having more value than others. Just look at the way he visited the Palisades and not Altadena after the fires and the types of language he uses for immigrants of color, dehumanizing them.
Yes. Racism is convicted felon Trump’s only deeply held “value.” The rest is just common grift.
A few people have said that. I agree. Project 2025 needed someone like Trump and Trump needed something like Project 2025...it's a symbiotic relationship. I have read or seen analysis that what the US is experiencing in Trump and Project 2025 is the inevitable result of Reaganism. Trump is a very one dimensional villian. He is racist but has no capacity to understand the economic (or any other) implications of his personal philosophy (if you can even call it that), other than whether it brings him immediate validation, attention, power and wealth. He's a narcissist but a very stupid one. However, I am not convinced the authors of Project 2025 are so stupid. I think they may understand that they are taking a wrecking ball to the US economy but they are doing it for a higher cause in their mind which can be largely summarised as neo-Nazism and a new US hegemony. Trump and his bunch of weirdos are the acceptable face of that. I cannot imagine Stephen Miller, Russ Vought or Tom Homan being capable of the same job.
And don't forget a compliant - sometimes enthusiastically so - Senate and House. They're the pipeline to making this all more than mere ephemeral executive orders.
he is a skilled performer of kayfabe. he may not understand why he is doing what he is doing all the time, but he knows how to do it.
You're right that a Cheeto is a tool for the Project 2025 folks - but it's also correct that the sycophants around him will not stop his worst instincts, e.g. getting revenge on people by politicizing the DOJ, withholding FEMA aid from states that he doesn't like, imposing tariffs that have the potential to upend our economy, etc.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
- Carl Sagan
It's astounding. To this day Republicans are still trying to avenge Nixon. Even those who weren't even born yet.. Assuming for a moment that humanity survives long enough, future historians a century or two from now will be looking at the criminality of the Reagan administration, Bush I, Bush II, and now Trump, and marvel at how gullible the voting public was.
Yup. As it's said here in East Resume Speed UT, "Ya cain't fix stoopid!"
People who voted for felon47 are not stupid. They knew what they were voting for, and they like what they got. They are, however, willfully ignorant and able to inaccurately blame Democrats for anything they don’t like.
This is spot on. We saw it happen last time. People got intellectually and spiritually captured.
They will happily crash the entire countries economy just to make the brown folks feel afraid and suffer. Shame they don't realize their hatred is burning the house down with all of us still trapped inside it.
I'm all for them being prosperous. They just need to be prosperous *in their own country.*
I have seen people say the Trumpists will come around once they see the damage to the economy, but based on what I know about history they will probably not. Musk is certainly not intelligent enough to be Trump's Hjalmar Schacht, the gifted if evil finance minister of the early Third Reich. But he might prove to be a passable Fritz Sauckel. Sauckel was the man who organized the "Reichsarbeitsdienst", the compulsory service that pressed jobless Germans into forced labor at essentially an apprentice's wage, half of which was withheld for food and barrack housing. It is hard to image than the new administration will let an opportunity pass to make the poor work for the rich and harvest those fields. And it did not reduce support for the Nazi regime back then. On the contrary, support for Hitler grew stronger. Historian Götz Aly proposed a theory (that did not make it into academic mainstream AFAIK) that Germans felt they were so much in on the crime by being complicit for too long, that they saw their only chance of not being judged or punished in doubling down and physically destroy all that might condemn them, and based on the responses to the last week, this might be very well what will happen in response to Trumpism (and not just in the US; European business "leaders" (no accident this translates to "Führer") essentially propose that Europe should give in and bow essentially to Trump rule. Don't be hopeless, but don't put your hope into the ones who created this mess.
Consider: states are beginning to experiment with child labor. Do we think rich kids will be working in the slaughterhouses?
Congress is once again trying to require recipients of federal assistance to work, including people who receive Medicaid. Do we think rich people are receiving Medicaid? And the continuing efforts to get rid of Obamacare? If people must rely on employment to receive healthcare, they will put up with many exploitive labor practices. Again, do we think rich people will be harmed by this? Eike, I agree with you: the oligarchs will make sure every poor person is forced into serfdom.
I don't see Barron Trump or his pals being packed off to pick oranges or grapes, do you?
Europe's far right parties seem to be ever more puppets of Musk et al. Unpatriotic fools masquerading as nationalists.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the people who complained that national interest was undermined by international financial elites are undermining national interest with support from international financial elites; the Nazis are the people the Nazis warned us against.
The specter of vigilantism is terrifying—and we know how the current administration deals with vigilantes—they pardon them and elevate them. I appreciate the charts, to see how bad this will be for so many industries, especially home building and construction.
It is all horrifying, with echoes both of the Nazi regime and apartheid South Africa. I grew up under an authoritarian regime, and these are all signs of one. Appalling. Thank you for your excellent coverage.
Prof. Krugman -- Jonathan V. Last has suggested that Trump's deportation raids and other economic actions will try to hurt blue states and spare red states: https://substack.com/home/post/p-155332951 . What are your thoughts about this?
So who will be the next scapegoat for higher food and housing price ? Women maybe, for stealing the men's jobs...
Yep. Now that we're not going to enforce the Civil Rights Act, I'm waiting to see conservative women told they don't get the job, despite being qualified, "because that would be taking the job away from a man who needs to support his family."
That’s one of the flaws in the fascist ointment. By dominating women, denying them birth control and abortion, their “barefoot and pregnant” stay-at-home handmaids will make the labor shortages worse. Guess they will need more child labor. And maybe we seniors will have to work for our Medicare? At least those of us who aren’t fulfilling our destiny providing grandchild-care…
One reason for allied victory in ww2 was Britain and the US mobilised it's women to work in the factories whilst the men were fighting. This was anathema to Nazi ideology, who used unreliable and unmotivated slave labour.
Hegseth is going to weaken our military dramatically both by driving out women, minorities, and left-leaning men, but also by wrecking recruitment of the same people. This is not in any way a good thing for our national security.
Right, isn't the officer corps recruitment from those evil woke universities?
Adam Tooze disagreed with that in "Wages of Destruction": his view is that a key Nazi economic weakness was a backward and highly labor-intensive agricultural sector, which absorbed most of the female labor that the Allies would have employed in factories.
Interesting, I'll have to check him out.
Sometimes I feel like MAGA and the TechBros would like to adopt that Nazi program. If not for all the job vacancies, we’d be relegated to Kinder, Küche, Kirche.
Its not hard to imagine Trump eradicating anti-discrimination laws by fiat.
He’s already started. Just getting warmed up.
First it will be Biden and the Democrat's fault. They stood in the way of the Republican's agenda. If things really start to go south, I think they'll start putting out false data.
That is exactly what he did. They didn't have gas ovens but that's exactly what they were. When you lock people up en masse because their ethnicity you are creating concentration camps. The British coined the term when they did the same with white South African farmers during the Boer War.
"They didn't have gas ovens..."
You mean yet. That too could change at any time.
Perfect 1984 reference!
If we consider those in the construction trades who are voting citizens, my sense is that they are mostly Trump voters, so this talk of suspending outlays for infrastructure projects would be another case of Trump/Republican policies hurting their own base. Just what the fate of the massive Biden infrastructure projects is going to be is a key question.
The Trump voters think they voted for lower inflation, kicking out illegal criminal gangs who are taking over our cities doing bad stuff, cutting regulations that stymie business and waste money, cutting taxes by getting other countries to pay, increasing the role of Christianity and sticking it to the arrogant liberals.
MAGA has much better sales force. They lie, but that doesn't matter right now.
The MAGA base is voting against their own interests, but this isn't anything new.
Sadly some of these people won't learn until/unless they are personally affected.
I was overseas just after the inauguration and my wife, an immigrant, already was worried about forgetting her driver’s license. Neighbors are scared. I had to ask our school district about their policy regarding cooperation with law enforcement. The psychological effects are already devastating. It’s racially divided too, as my white neighbors aren’t even paying attention and are happily living their lives as if everything is normal. It’s insidious.
Looking more and more like the Nazi playbook. (That Nanci Griffith album is A+++!!! Also the whole album is like a balm.)
Looks like this is beginning to play out just as Timothy Snyder predicted. Damn.
Brazilians were transported in a military airplane, with hands and feet in chains. They were kept like that for about 50 hours due to mechanical problems; there were children and women. Men were brutalized; the plane had to stop on Manaus, Brazilian law was ignored, people kept inside. Federal Police had to force them to open it and let the people leave. An Air Force was sent by President Lula to bring the citizens to their destination. The country (except Bolsonaro and his gang) is chocked, appalled. The USA is throwing LA countries into China arms. The Chinese are certainly enjoying the show.